Model Citizen: A Memoir

By Joshua Mohr

The intimate, gorgeous, garish confessions of Joshua Mohr—writer, father, alcoholic, addict

Her teeth marks in the wood are some of my favorite things. Every now and again she rips the pick out of my hand and tosses it inside the guitar . . . I hold it over my head, hole down, shaking it back and forth, the pick rattling around in there. And as it ricochets from side to side, I always think about pills. Maybe the pick has turned into oxy. Or Norco, codeine, Demerol. Maybe it’s a pill and when it falls out I can gobble it up.

After years of hard-won sobriety, while rebuilding a life with his wife and young daughter, thirty-five-year-old Joshua Mohr suffers a stroke—his third, it turns out— which uncovers a heart condition requiring surgery. Which requires fentanyl, one of his myriad drugs of choice. This forced “freelapse” should fix his heart, but what will it do to his sobriety? And what if it doesn’t work?

Told in stunning, surreal, time-hopping vignettes, Model Citizen is a raw, revealing portrait of an addict. Mohr shines a harsh spotlight into all corners of his life, throwing the wild joys, tragedies, embarrassments, and adventures of his past into bold relief.

Pulsing with humanity and humor, revealing the immediacy of an addict climbing out of the murky pit of his past, Model Citizen is a darkly beautiful, incisive confession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374718817

Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir Sirens and of several novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called "beat-poet cool." His novel All This Life won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.

Book preview

PART I

COLUMBUS & COLUMBUS

PROLOGUE

When I was in kindergarten I stabbed myself with a pencil, on purpose—one minute sitting in class holding the thing in my hand wondering what it would feel like to be stabbed, the next, hitting my open palm with the pencil’s tip, screaming and sobbing and bleeding, the teacher taking me to a water fountain to clean the wound, asking, Why why why, Josh, why on earth would you do that?

I still have the graphite lodged in my palm. I’m looking at it right now. And for the next ninety thousand words, you’ll be staring at it, too.

1

It’s six in the morning on New Year’s Day and Ava cries from the crib, which means my wife says something to me like, Your turn, and I say something whiny like, Bottle, fine, and stumble into the kitchen and spill milk on the counter and don’t wipe it up, leave it for later, after coffee, after caffeine makes my mind fire right. I tuck the bottle in the waistband of my drawers so I can hoist Ava up with both arms, and she says, Let’s play, a new phrase for her, and I carry her back into our bed and lay her in the middle and get back in myself, Lelo and I flanking her, the three of us lying like a happy family, and for twenty seconds that’s what we are.

Then the numbness starts.

I notice it first in my right arm, then realize it’s creeping into my leg, too. That’s weird, I think, two limbs falling asleep at the same time.

Soon there’s no feeling on that entire side of my body, from shoulder to toes.

I shift positions, rolling onto my back, so blood can flow freely.

Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.

Still numb.

Fear spills out of me like the milk rolling down my daughter’s chin. I shake my dead hand back and forth, back and forth, and say to Lelo, Something’s wrong, and she says, What? and I say, 911.

She’s to the phone fast and I roll over onto my stomach, a gesture that Ava interprets as an invitation to play and she’s straddling my back and yelling, Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop!

My frantic wife doing her best to conjure the paramedics and me knowing beyond any doubt that the numbness will zip over me like a body bag and Ava keeps chanting, Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop! and I am crying uncontrollably, grieving a girl I’ll never get to see turn into a woman, and if this is the end of my life, I wish it had ended sooner. Wish I had died before meeting Lelo, before ever seeing Ava on the ultrasound, the size of an orange seed, our nickname for her until she was born.

I wish I’d never gotten sober, never tried to be a better person. Why endure so much harrowing improvement to die like this at thirty-eight years old?

---

In 2004, while I was in grad school at the University of San Francisco, I volunteered at a halfway house in the Mission District, teaching creative writing.

Kae was one of my students at the halfway house. He had spent fifteen years in San Quentin and was out two weeks when I met him. One of the conditions of his parole was that he had to stay clean or he’d be busted back to prison. After the first session we had together, he came up to me and said, Gonna be the first American Indian to win the National Book Award for nonfiction.

It made me like him immediately. Here he was fresh from the penitentiary and he had no fear of odds, no concept of how remote the chances were of that happening. Or he did know and didn’t care. Maybe winning the National Book Award seemed easy after pulling all those years in prison.

The first essay he handed in made me think he might actually do it. The scene was short, maybe four or five paragraphs that dramatized Kae sitting on the sidewalk, against the front of a twenty-four-hour donut shop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, the part of town where junkies roamed in an animal refuge, no police, no poachers, so long as they kept their chaos in a contained radius. This is changing as the city gentrifies, but back then, the TL was an addict asylum.

In the scene, Kae was out of heroin and he wore only an undershirt and he’d never been so cold in his life, so hungry, so depleted. A taxi parked out front of the donut shop, the driver talking on his cell, arguing with someone. Kae watched words explode from the driver’s mouth and then he saw the exhaust puffing from the tailpipe, looking like a steam room, giving him an idea. Freezing, Kae crawled, pulled himself across the sidewalk to the cab’s back, first warming his hands in the exhaust, finally submerging his head in that toxic cloud, lathering himself in the car’s warmth and affection.

The story ended there, the reader sucking carbon monoxide right along with Kae, smelling the acrid poison, but also feeling its billowy tenderness.

I finished it and started right back at the beginning, reread it a few more times. This guy was good and needed help, needed someone to treat him like he wasn’t just another convict.

You might do it, I said to Kae, handing his essay back with my notes, ways I thought he could make it even better.

Do what?

Win the National Book Award.

He eyeballed me. Kae was in his fifties, dark complexion set off with pale patches of eczema that he constantly scratched. His head was kept in a crew cut. Old and faded tribal tattoos on his forearms.

Course I’ll do it, he said.

---

They were always calling out, screwing around, and I dug their chaos during our classes. They didn’t have to front tough; no one was a gangster while we wrote. Nobody had felonies hanging from their necks like nooses. We were people talking about storytelling, and that was all we were.

I had one student who was illiterate. She came up to me and said, Do you have to know reading for this class?

She was in her forties. I stayed after our sessions and read our assignments to her. Usually, she didn’t like the stories I chose, saying something like, These people is snobs. She was right. My first batch of stories was too much head, not enough heart. All the characters brandished vocabularies like weapons, but all it really did for them was provide more words to describe their disappointments in life.

Everyone was in some sort of halfway house.

One time, I was scheduled to teach the morning after Valentine’s Day. My ex-wife—well, not my ex yet when this all happened, Blue was still my disappointed wife, my why-did-I-pick-this-guy wife—decided that we should go out for a fancy Valentine’s Day dinner. It was only one meal, after all, and what could go wrong?

I went from martinis to a few beers and we drank a couple bottles of champagne during the meal and don’t forget after-dinner drinks. We had to cocktail hard, otherwise there was this whole conversation thing. Couples have to talk, they say. We hadn’t been talking much at all because earlier that week we’d had a huge fight. I’d done another dumb thing so I bunked at Shany’s house, making up maudlin and self-sympathetic remixes of what had happened. Shany was my best friend, and even she thought I was in the wrong.

Have you even apologized to her? she said.

We both need to say we’re sorry.

So no.

Not yet.

If you want to fix this, go home.

So I slunk back. I don’t even think Blue took her eyes off the TV when I rolled in. Blue needed to believe in something and I wasn’t giving her much. We spent pretty much every night in one Mission District bar or another. Hell, we had fallen in love in dive bars, but recently she’d grown weary of going at it so hard every night, which didn’t make sense to me.

Weary?

Of what?

Of whiskey and jukeboxes and free peanuts? Of friends and adventures and bummed smokes? Of giving a kiss to an angel you’ll never see again? Of all singing along when Sister Christian played from cheap speakers?

I’m not one of those sober cats who looks back and demonizes everything from when they were dirty. I’m glad I embarrassed myself all those nights because I learned what shame was.

What shame is.

It’s impossible to describe real shame to somebody who hasn’t thrived on self-destruction.

---

Kae wasn’t having it. We met at a café close to the halfway house, around 15th and Mission. Talking about his donut shop essay. I had made a bunch of suggestions for how to make it better, but he didn’t think it needed any improvements.

Already wrote it, he said. It’s done.

You can make changes. Writers revise.

That’s the whole story already on the page.

He was distracted, looking out the window, scratching his eczema. I was mad that he wasn’t taking this meeting more seriously. I didn’t get paid to teach there, so I sure as hell didn’t get any money for sitting in a café listening to someone say he wouldn’t edit.

Are you waiting for somebody? I said, knocking on the window.

He didn’t even look at me. Ain’t got nobody to wait for.

Your story is pretty good, I said, trying to make him focus, but it can be great.

Used to grind right down there, Kae said, pointing up 16th Street. There was a BART station and everyone knew if you needed opiates or crack or crank in the Mission that was where you scored. I knew it intimately, buying bindles there myself, though I never told Kae. Selling shit and getting high, he said. How am I supposed to stay clean living a block away?

You do it so you don’t go back to prison, I said.

Easy as that, huh? He still wasn’t looking at me, staring out the window like he sat on an airplane and there was something panoramic down below, the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, heroin. Most of my life was standing on those corners.

Do you want to talk about your essay?

No, he said, I don’t.

---

Here was what had caused my fight with Blue earlier that Valentine’s week: I was super coked up and had at least ten Fernets swimming in me when I met her and a couple of girlfriends (I’d been bartending around the corner and got off at midnight and hoofed to Laszlo) so we could all cocktail. I knew the guys slinging drinks there pretty well, Rick and Brian, who had a whole Brokeback Mountain thing going on, except instead of illicit fishing trips they blew dunes of coke and slow danced while the sun came up, much to the chagrin of Brian’s wife.

Me walking over and kissing Blue and saying hey to her friends and immediately heading to the bar to buy the table a round, having a quick pop with the Brokeback brigade and striking up a conversation with the woman next to me, some debutante all dressed up, slumming it in the Mission. I dealt with these posh ladies all the time on the weekends behind my own bar, as they turned our neighborhood into the Dirty Marina—the rich seeing how the paupers lived, or that’s how it was back then; now the Mission is the Marina—and I hated these crosstown tourists but also dug making them want to screw me, and cocaine made me a charming chauvinist who some women found irresistible and apparently this lady was one of those because she flirted right off, and I looked her up and down and she wore these crazy jeweled shoes that looked like chandeliers and some belligerent carnival barker in my head demanded I drink whiskey from one of them stat.

Which I said to her, making her giggle and bite her bottom lip, and I said, What’s funny? and she said, You’re crazy, and I said, You’ve got that right, pretty lady and leaned down slipping off one of her shoes and my wife was at a corner table having no idea that I was being such a scumbag, simply chatting with her friends, waiting for me to come back with a round of drinks, enjoying a normal night cocktailing until the moment she couldn’t stand me anymore, though that was still minutes away, me trying to convince one of the Brokeback blokes to pour whiskey straight in this girl’s shoe and either Rick or Brian asking her, You okay with this? and she pointed at me and laughed and said, He’s crazy, and Rick/Brian already knew that, of course, and poured whiskey in her shoe, my chalice, and the music thumped some Chicago break beats, and most people at the bar started cheering when I brought the shoe to my lips and slurped out all the booze and the woman whose shoe it was clapped and made some sorority-style squeals and I asked the debutante if she wanted to dance and she said, Sure, and I said, Not here, and she said, Where?

I still had her shoe in my hand and I knocked on the bar with it and said, Up there, and she squealed again and I jumped on the bar and pulled her up there too and we let the music take over, dancing terribly, me flying the shoe all about, doing my whole king-of-the-bar shtick, dancing with spirits and blow and a squealing debutante.

I wonder if Blue saw me herself or if one of her friends had to point toward the bar and ask, Is that your husband up there?

I wonder what went through her mind turning to look, having witnessed countless of my idiotic shenanigans, each of them tangling together, creating a huge ball of humiliations, too much for one wife to take, and it was over, I was over, we were over, I’d gone too far not with the outlandishness of this one incident per se, but the speeding boulder of all the times I embarrassed Blue, and I bet she didn’t even answer her friend, bet she simply stood and stormed and all the ire coursed through her and out her fingertips.

I never saw her coming, one second dancing and zooming the shoe in zigzags and the next feeling pressure on the backs of my legs.

Feet leaving the bar.

Weight flipping in a slow-motion tumble.

I must have dropped the shoe, must have brought my hands up to protect my face, must have thought it was the debutante’s beau or a jilted one-night stand, it never occurred to me that Blue might mastermind this violent fate, still falling, still feeling my legs whipping up until I was upside down. I crashed face-first to Laszlo’s floor. Landed and lay there. And then it was like the whole room vanished. All the other people gone. Except the two of us. Blue and me. Music nixed. The shining shoe sitting on the floor. Blue standing above me. The look in her eyes was all anger. At this drunk she’d tethered herself to. At this person too dense to treat other people with dignity.

I lay there bleeding and my head all sideways, shocked but also proud of our life’s chaos. Loved all the shoves I never saw coming.

The shoe-chandelier should have been my headstone, a lighthouse, tossing watts to mark the grave of a lousy husband. A whimpering eulogy flitting on the wind, saying a parasite, a wrecking ball, a waste.

---

Kae and I met before or after class for the next couple weeks. I’d worn him down about revision, about the idea that a story needs more work after its initial conception. I did this by sharing a couple of my short stories with him: I showed him the rough drafts, and then the final, published products.

Which is better?

These is shit, he said, meaning the rough drafts. These is solid, he said, pointing at the finals.

So will you revise the donut shop piece? I said. I can help you publish it.

Why do you help me?

I want you to win the National Book Award.

I was playing about that, said Kae. Can’t win.

You can, I said. You’re super talented.

Kae smiled. You think?

---

Back to Valentine’s Day, where Blue and I were stuck with wonderful French food in front of us and having a terrible time. She could barely look at me. From her perspective, dancing on the bar with that woman was the latest example of me disrespecting her. I had bad boundaries with the opposite sex. I knew it and she knew it and everyone we ran around with knew it, and that was what made her so pissed: how public it all was.

A couple free Fernets with the bartender on our way out the door. He and I had watched the sun rise a few times, telling our war stories at mach speeds, the cocaine making us sprint through our life’s woes. I can’t remember his name, but I can tell you his mom used to beat him with a hair dryer.

Blue and I were specifically calling it an early night so I could be semi-coherent at the halfway house in the morning. I had to be there at 9:00 a.m., and I didn’t want to show up stinking of booze. The people there worked so hard to clean up their lives, and I liked pretending that I was trying, too.

But the cops had other ideas of how this Valentine’s Day was going to end. Sirens and a failed field sobriety test. Blue taking a cab home and me heading to the drunk tank. Another night wedged in a cell with a bunch of hammerheads. The highlight was always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich early in the morning. Did I really like them, or is that only how I’m remembering it now? I remember those sandwiches tasting like they were made by god, the almighty creator sticking a knife into each jar, getting the proportions just right.

---

I brought a couple books that I thought would help Kae dig into his rewrite. The first was Denis Johnson’s Angels. The other was Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live. Those writers did emotional filth like few others. They’d be good role models on the page for Kae.

Somebody buzzed me in the halfway house and one of the supervisors called me into the office. She collated a huge mound of pages into a bunch of smaller stacks. She was fast at it. In another life, she would have been the most sought after dealer in Vegas.

Kae got busted back, she told me.

What?

He failed a piss test.

So he’s in jail?

In county now, then back to the pen.

For how long?

For the rest of his suspended sentence, she said, not looking up at me, just slamming new pages down in her stacks. That was a provision of his parole.

How long is his suspended sentence?

I got no idea, she said.

But it could be years?

She actually laughed at this. Oh, it’s definitely years, she said. Do you know what he did to get locked up in the first place?

Why? I asked her. I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell me anything, certainly not what I needed to hear. The information I was after could only come from Kae.

She stopped collating that massive stack of papers. Why what, Josh?

Why did he relapse?

The woman shrugged.

There has to be a reason, I said.

No, she said, there doesn’t. Happens every day.

She kept slapping pages down on her swelling stacks.

I left the office and went into the room the students and I met in and wrote Class Canceled on the dry-erase board. I stormed out of the halfway house and threw the books I brought for Kae in the trash. On the days I didn’t have MFA classes, I tended bar at a place over on Valencia. I was scheduled to work that day but my shift didn’t start for like seven hours. Time suddenly delegated to a wake, a funeral, a proper send-off for Kae.

I hit the closest dive bar and ordered a shot of tequila, a beer in a can; I made a cheesy eulogy-cheers for Kae and downed my shot.

What’s going on? the bartender said once I chugged the whole beer. He wanted to chum it up since we were the only people there. Without asking, he got me another tequila and Tecate.

He’s gone, I said and threw the tequila back. Kae had quit. He had one last shot to get his shit together, and he couldn’t, and all those years in prison that could have been avoided regenerated around his body, steel bars, cement, sealing him away from any future. If the stakes were that high for him and he couldn’t stay clean, what chance did I have?

Sure, I ruptured a marriage, but that was nothing compared to Kae or the others at the halfway house. Maybe I’d get divorced, fired. Neither of those offenses would lead me to San Quentin. Without any serious penalties, I was going to keep punishing myself. It was the punishment that got me high.

In my early twenties, living in a punk house in the Sunset District, I suggested a game of beer-bottle baseball. I handed somebody a bat in our living room and stood like fifteen feet in front of him and I lobbed a beer bottle and he hit it and smashed it and shards of glass flew everywhere, cutting the shit out of my face, and I was laughing like the animals laughed once they realized Noah’s ark was going to float, and I kept pitching bottles and people kept clubbing the glass to bits and each and every cut on my face was where it was supposed to be, each cut was perfect.

Another? the bartender asked, probably wondering what was taking me so long with the new tequila shot.

I’m going to drink until I black out.

I’ve heard worse ideas, he said.

---

The morning after my failed field sobriety test, the heavenly PB&J, they let me out of jail about 8:00 a.m. I had time to get to the halfway house to teach. I really wanted to go that morning. It felt important, doing something for other people.

I stopped by a store and bought a pack of gum and a bottle of Gatorade. There was no time to take a shower or brush my teeth. I knocked on the halfway house’s door and somebody buzzed me in. The class started in two minutes.

The number of students fluctuated based on who had job interviews, who had to work, who had house responsibilities. The week before we had fifteen students, which was a record, and I thought the class was our best yet and we’d build on it and things would get stronger.

Which made it even worse the day I came straight from jail. That morning, I walked into the classroom and no one was there. Not one student. It was 9:00 a.m. and I figured I’d give them a grace period. We all need a grace period.

It was impossible that nobody would show. We’d had small classes before, maybe four or five. Never zero, though. That couldn’t happen.

I sat there by myself until 9:30, and the only reason I got up was that I started crying. There I was, drunk in the bathroom of a halfway house, the biggest wreck on the premises, and I didn’t even live there. I had to get out. The longer I stayed, the better the odds that I was going to be discovered. Exposed for who I really was.

I heard Shany’s voice saying, If you want to fix this, go home.

I don’t know how, I said to the empty bathroom.

---

Me, you, any stranger standing around and watching, we would have messed up that morning at the donut shop. We’d have seen sadness as Kae crawled across the sidewalk to warm himself in a fart of carbon monoxide.

See, to Kae there was no tailpipe. No taxi. No driver. Kae didn’t take in any of that.

He saw a house. Saw a mother making singsong syllables to a baby in a bathtub. Saw kindness coming out of the exhaust pipe. Saw nourishment, grace, saw exactly what he needed to survive another day, and isn’t that all any of us are after? Won’t we do anything to